This will not stand!
I haven’t even read the God Delusion yet and PZ goes ripping up a perfectly good copy.
What. A. Waste!
Books have information, and history, and store atmospheric carbon by the megaton! to just rip their pages out is a waste. Grrr.
Unless they are mildewy, of course, or you are about to freeze to death (and it is a particularly bad book).

Seriously, though, I have kept half an eye on the Great Cracker Controversy and am completely mystified.
Yeah, PZ is being a bit of an assholedeliberately provocative, but honestly…

anyway,enough of that crap, though it does remind me of my own encounter with the Eucharist:

I was going out with this catholic girl, see, and she decided one weekend that it had been too long since she had gone to church, so she asked me to come along, on a nice spring day, and we could stop by the pub after or something.
Fair ‘nough – kinda cultural exchange thingy.

Now, the Church of Iceland is (highish) Lutheran in the Scandihoovian style, and does not go in for such popery. And most of my encounters with European churches had been with the Stern Presbyterian end of the spectrum…
So, I was most interested in the cracker and wine ceremony and went along with it, as one does.
The wine sucked, I still remember just how bad it was – if you’re going to do this, would it be too much to get a decent wine? Maybe some red eastern Med style for the sake of history?
Anyway, the cracker was worse, so I only had a nibble and palmed the rest.

Now what to do?
Well, right outside the church was this jolly nice pond.
With ducks.
Hungry ducks.
Holy ducks.

I only got a couple of crumbs tossed when my friend noticed and reacted.
I had not appreciated what good reaction speed she had.
Anyway, after confiscating the remants and looking flustered, she decided to eat the rest.Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Then we went for a beer and ploughman’s lunch, as I recall.
I think the next catholic church I went to was St Peter’s – very impressive, the old Pope was there, I left the crackers alone and admired the art and stagecraft.

This was one of the reasons my ex-g’s reaction rather surprised me.
It wasn’t a catholic church – it was protestant – no way she could consistently accept that the eucharist there was properly consecrated, no matter what her other beliefs.
Just reflex behaviour.

The fact that she went out for beers with you tells me she wasn’t too upset about it… or was she? I wrote about PZ in my blog as well (truthisawoman.wordpress.com). How do we “get through” to folks who are so outraged by all this?

English ducks, mallards as I recall, as befits an Anglican wafer.
So, yes, I presume a couple of them were (half?)saved, or sated, or something.

girlfriend was not too upset about that, mildly scandalised I think, in a knee-jerk sort of way.
I was honestly not trying to dis the place or the process, I was just a rather thoughtless 20 year old atheist who wanted to dispose of a dry and tasteless cracker in a non-littering sort of way…

I already have almost 2000 e-mails in my inbox, my life would grind to a halt if I got even 200 through the blog.

I had actually carefully avoided the Great Cracker Controversy, but I couldn’t stand by idly while PZ rips up perfectly good books. Some principles we have to take a stand on.
And I wanted an excuse to put up pictures of the Falmer Duck Pond.

And to get through to believers, I think the best way is to stop calling them “idiots”.

But PZ isn’t going for calm and rational discussion is he? He’s inflaming passions precisely so he can print some poor sap’s outraged and malformed response as proof that all religious people are stupid. I don’t like wingnuts doing these kind of stunts, and I’m not fond of the other side pulling this stuff either.

Nonsense.
The rest of the sciencebloggers are writing about it because they can’t help pontificating, because there is a certain fascination to the whole trainwreck, because it affects ScienceBlogs as a whole and because they wouldn’t be bloggers if they wouldn’t write about the strangest things…

Actually, a fair number of ScienceBloggers haven’t really touched the subject. I suspect a direct correlation between this fact and a lack of their need to be ego stroked. That, and possibly the fact that PZ’s childish antics have gotten real old.

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